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View Full Version : Sigil, Union, the French Provinces in the 19th century: Accents?



Illiterate Scribe
2008-05-09, 01:10 PM
Well, I'm just getting engaged in a game, and I was wondering: would Sigil and its suburb, Union, (yes, Mercanes, you run a suburb of her Ladyship's city; I'd rather have a single surly tiefling doomguard over a hundred of your LOL EPIC STREET CLEANERS) have different accents?

My character's a true daughter of the Cage, and I was considering engendering in her a Flaubert-style dislike of the by-contrast parochial and provincial Union.

The question that I ask you is this: do the two have any distinct accents? From what I've gathered, Sigil has a slight (!) Cockney accent, but has anything such been said on Union?

bosssmiley
2008-05-10, 05:54 AM
To me at least Sigil-speak sounds like a cross between Cockney (in vocab) and Southern Yorkshire in accent. Sure, the Sigilites might use the patter of an 18th century London street arab, but the tone of voice is likely to be substantially deeper and more truculent, with strong connotations of "Ya soft southern nancy that y'are!" and "Ah like whut ah do, and aah do whut ah bludy well like!".

Think Sean Bean with the Sigil variant of Smurf Syndrome. :smallbiggrin:

Union - at least as written - sucks, so I try to think about it as little as possible. If you're going to force me to though...

Let's face it, Union is basically a lazily sketched version of Hong Kong with a bunch of bound imp, construct and elemental servants replacing the toiling coolies of the original. You've got the trade centre, the outlying island estates (remember "Way of the Dragon"?), and the sacrosanct domain of the Mercane standing in for Manchu-ruled Canton. Just add a dash of neighbouring Macau's licentious money-worship and a touch of snobbish nouveau rich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_riche) hypocrisy ("Oh my dear, people below 21st level will never amount to anything. In fact they're hardly truly sentient at all.") and you're gold.

I tend to think of the accent of long-time residents of Union as speaking a cross between Received Pronunciation (or BBC) English - call it Epic Common - and the accents of the Mercane who founded the place, who I always think of as having a SE Asian flavour. Put the two together and you get a classic pidgin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin). If you've heard English spoken with a strong Filipino, Malay or Thai accent, you know how outright alien to both parent tongues the combination can sound.

A dictionary of New Guinea pidgin can be found here (http://www.june29.com/HLP/lang/pidgin.html) if you feel the need to berk-ify the Union dialect to the point of incoherence.

Illiterate Scribe
2008-05-10, 06:59 AM
Heh ... epic common. XD.

Good point about the Mercane - I think Ed Said would have a little bit to say about the idea of 'exotic Eastern traders', but now you say it, that is what WotC were going for. So I'd be looking at early 20th century British Colonial Hong Kong (with a little Burma on the side) for Union, something along the lines of Aleppo (lots of trade) for the city of Brass, and Yorkshire Cockneys for Sigil?

Brilliant. :smallamused: